A Garden of Possibilities

Seasonal Guide to Winning Plant Combos

Combining perennials to get a pleasing mix of color, texture and form sounds simple.  But it’s not.  The wonderful thing about perennials is they are easy to move around in your garden so experimenting to find the ideal combination is not a major chore.

If you’re looking for an easy way to find winning perennial combinations without moving plants here and there in your garden you might want to check out Perennial Companions:  100 Dazzling Plant Combinations for Every Season by Tom Fischer.  This small soft-cover book is full of 100 pictures of perennials the author has combined into winning vignettes.

The book is divided into different sections based on the time of the year the combo is most dazzling.  That makes it easy to add multi-season interest to your  garden.  Need some color in the early spring – mid spring?  How about combining the blue flowers of Glory-of-the-Snow (Chionodoxa forbesii) and the bright red stalks of a Santa Fe peony (Paeonia lactiflora ‘Santa Fe’) just poking through the ground. While this is one of my favorite photos in the book, I am also aware that this winning combinations lasts just days.  There are also combinations in the book that will last all season long, namely the ones involving foliage plants like Pulmonaria and Carex.  As far as I’m concerned, this is the type of perennial combination I look for in my garden.  And in the gardens I design for my clients.

While this little book covers a lot of ground, I do have one complaint with the photos.  Most of them show just a narrow slice of the garden, leaving the reader to wonder what’s happening to the right or left of the plants shown.  The few photos that show a larger area of the garden are much more instructive and interesting.  You get a sense of the garden not just of a few plants next to each other.

So if you’re looking for some ideas on interesting perennials combinations I would definitely recommend checking out Perennials Companions.  But while you’re at it, check out a few other titles on the subject too.

Note:  This book was provided to me by the publisher, Timber Press, for the express purpose of reviewing it.